On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Robin Cantin wrote:
> The thought of a province (3) ruled to (6) going from population
> 10,000 to 40,000 in just one year seems a little far-fetched, no
> matter how many grant of lands or irrigration projects a Regent
> undertakes.
I wholeheartedly agree.
> My explaination, like many people, was to say province level reflects
> infrastructure (irrigation, windmills, etc) as much as population,
My preferred explanation is not so much construction of new infrastructure
as it is expanding control over existing infrastructure. I also rather
like Starfoxs urbanization idea, but Im not completely converted yet; in
particular, I think adopting it might require additional significant
changes to pillaging and troop mustering, especially of levies – not that
those arent possible, but that I havent yet seen replacements I like.
> so that province (6) might actually have far less people than the
> 40,000 stated in the rulebook, but increases gradually to that level
> over time.
This is where we part company. I think all the people are already there:
for example, since all plains provinces can be increased to a maximum
level of 10, I think there are 100,000 people already living in each one.
This means that the province level is really a measure of how efficient
the regent is at getting the people to do what he wants.
> But come from where? Natural growth? Without doing the math, it seems
> to me it would take decades to get that kind of increase.
Right. This is why I think the people have to already be there – I don`t
think your way of looking at the Rule action fixes its real problem.
Now Anuire is a small place, so we can suppose most of the increase
comes from immigration from other provinces or even domains,
Gary is an advocate of the immigration explanation, but I don`t buy it.
That would require much more mobility than I think the common people ought
to have, and also breaks down on the large scale – looking at Cerilia as
a whole, “population growth equals immigration” must imply that Rule
Province is a zero-sum game (lots of Ruling somewhere depends on lots of
Pillaging elsewhere) or else it completely fails to address the too-fast
population growth problem.
> What if the province or small domain is practically cut off from the
> continent, either because of distance or magic (Warding spell)?
Yes, immigration certainly breaks down, in much the same way it does for
the continent as a whole – I don`t see that there are hundreds of
thousands of people moving from Aduria and Djapar to Cerilia every year.
Anyone came up with a system to limit province increases until the
population catches up?
I made one once that was a bit like Bjørns method, involving population growing on its own and the difficulty of Rule actions being modified by how many more or fewer people were there than the rulebook table wanted, but I found that since it meant each province could only be ruled about once per generation the complexity of the mechanic Id written really
didn`t help me very much more than just randomly picking one province on
the map to simply Rule itself each domain turn. For “maximum game fun”
purposes, I tend to lean towards interpretations of the Rule action that
make it possible to keep close to the current mechanic.
Ryan Caveney
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